You visited a few times and I would appreciate your thoughts on this post, why not comment?

Psst want to make money, loads of money well I???m going to show you how and I bet not a single one of you will do it!

What???s more I???m glad you won???t as I???m going to introduce you to the 6 month scam. Its called the 6 month scam because it takes six months and relies on you being a little deceptive at the end but lets start you can always decide which point you want to stop.

The six month scam

Take $250 and make $2500 in 6 months and less then 10 hours work.

You???re a webmaster right? So we are going to make a website, then direct lots of traffic to it then sell it. Simple, now we could do this all very legitimately and most of this post can be used without any thought to morals, but this wouldn???t be a grey hat post without some moral compass twiddling. If you don???t have $250 don???t panic just ask Nick to ask me back so I can write about how to make your first $250 on the web.

Shopping List

• Domain
• Hosting
• Articles
• Traffic

Domain

Well in reality a nice which can become a domain, try to think of a niche that is not to close to your primary interest (remember unlike most sites we ultimately want to sell it and have no need to create competition) but you have some knowledge, you want the subject to be general and pretty vague for this example we will use beer the stable drink of many! So next we need to come up with a domain name, when choosing domain names avoid names that need extra registration details, such as .org,.net or regional names, also avoid .biz and .info which has become the home of spammers, its worth paying the couple of $$$ more for the .com name.
Final words of warning register the name with one of the larger companies, ???Go Daddy??? or similar this will ease transfer and keep you main domain pool separate

Quick Tip

When registering domains find a single supplier for your main domains that???s not one of the big boys, its worth paying to have these domains well looked after, but make sure your larger network are on different registrars. While I would never suggest faking the Whois info on your ???network??� it???s probably worth not making it public, while making your smaller main domains, fully readable.

Hosting

So once we have the domain we need to host it, again its time to think this through, I suggest finding a cheap reseller account, then set up a further account as a customer of the reseller. This way you can have multiple sites in the larger network up and running, while appearing at least at first glance to be independent. When looking for hosting make sure it has the usual php/mysql etc, also cron and ssh would be a nice touch but price should override features.

Once the hosting is set-up get yourself Wordpress or similar and set it up grab yourself a theme, if you???re a designer, then design one, otherwise find a theme that has very few downloads at the various sites (even an ugly one that is near unique is better then a common one)

Now we are optimising the site for traffic and traffic alone, so go grab an auto translation software scripts, a couple are knocking around on Digital point (note: the one I use I had to modify so that rather then creating a page on the fly each request, it pulled the language and then was stored as a new post)

You might also wish to generate pages, from search results, Google now penalises such pages but other engines do not.

Articles

6 months is 24 weeks, ideally you need 24 articles on your subject, now this is not always going to be easy so I suggest writing between 5-10 yourself, and using pre-published articles for the rest, you will almost certainly be penalised by Google but that???s not an issue, we are using them simply to pad out the site. From the 5 to 10 that you do, you can pay some one, or simply write them yourself, try to include at least 1 post that is a list for example ???the best 10 beer recipes??�. Start posting to the site once you have written 3 articles, the first 2 articles published should be yours (make 1 sticky so it always appears at the top) then use some of the pre published stuff, adding your articles every 5 posts or so. If possible, the last few weeks should just be your posts.

I would suggest a posting strategy such as

Yours
Article
Article
Yours
Article
Yours
Article
Article
Article
Article
Article
Article
Article
Article/Yours
Yours
Article/Yours
Article
Article
Yours
Article
Article/Yours
Article/Yours
Yours
Yours
Yours
Yours

You will note that your articles are at either end with one in the middle, now most of these articles are destined to supplemental pages on a Google search, though the translated versions may not have such a problem Your articles are key when a person searches the site at the 6 month mark we want them to see as much original content as possible, and where is he/she going to look at the latest posts, then back at the first ones.

It is important to remember while the site may be using blogging software you want it to appear as an article site (turn off comments completely, don???t use track back in fact make it as un blog like as you can.) Organise the articles into categories.

Traffic

So you got most of the articles sorted and everything is going well, cool but we need traffic, lots of it and only for the last 3 months. We also need to raise the sites PR now you and I know PR is a complete waste of time used only by morons, but they are the people we are selling to, so before generating traffic, submit your site to say 50 high PR directories spread it over the first month but only go for high PR directories also look for other links from High PR based sites. If you feel you want or need to buy a couple of links (oops the Google thought police will be on to me) and then leave the site for 3 months.

When we sell the site we are only going to show a months worth of data, and when people ask for more give them 3 months worth so we don???t need to worry about the first 3 months, indeed don???t even install Google Analytics till month 3 (plausible deniability when asked can I see number of users from 4 months ago, oops sorry didn???t install Google Analytics sorry) In month 3 we start to build traffic we do this in 3 stages,

• Stumbleupon
• Social networks
• Paying for it

I love stumbleupon it brings hundreds if not thousands of visitors to my sites every day, from month 3 on wards stumble the site, and all your articles (unique ones) even the old ones, over a period of a month or so, always wait a couple of days before stumbling each new one.

Social Networks ??? In month 3 try to get onto dig, reddit and other social book marking sites, choose your best article for that month and of you go, repeat in month 5 and 6

However most of our traffic is coming from paid traffic, simply visit Digital Point and find the cheapest trafficker, you don???t care if its untargeted after all you???re selling the site. Build this traffic over 3 months and make sure it will end as the new owner takes over, unless you are using my second quick tip example, in which case fade it out over a month or so.

Quick Tip

This is where we go from grey to very dark grey!

A buyer with even some sense will want to see where all your traffic is coming from and it will be immediately obvious that you are paying for this traffic to avoid this we can go down 2 routes.

The first is to simply fool the user into thinking what they are seeing in the Google Analytics logs is all nice organic traffic, the second is to fool the web server into thinking its organic. Fooling the user is easier.

Fooling users looking at the analytics couldn???t be easier when we ask for our traffic, we simply specify the URL as http://www.myexample.com/?utm_source=google.com when directing the traffic, yep that it now it will appear (at least on the pie chart) as traffic from Google. Easy huh!

Well its obviously best if you vary the refer between your major referrers but you can hide loads of traffic that???s been paid for and make it appear to be all legit!

The second method involves creating a proxy that generates a referral header that is based on a list, you point your traffic at the proxy it appears on the site as coming from your various sources, more complicated but also capable of standing up to scrutiny, and once built can be reused again and again.

Selling it

So we move on 6 months, for the last few months we have been sending as much traffic as possible to the site, its been Dugg and Stumbled, now its time to sell. The site should have a good PR 4 minimum but with the right directories and 1 or 2 links PR 5/6.

Collect your Analytics data, don???t reveal referral logs unless you really have to, and initially only give rough (but accurate figures) producing the images only if really needed) place a BIN price of $3000 and auction the site of at major web sites.

That???s it you just sold a site for a couple of thousand dollars, now if you have done everything in this thread the site is probably worth $500 so you may have a very pissed off guy or you might have some one who really doesn???t know what???s just happened!

Note: If your going to do this and please don???t its not nice to scam someone, don???t place adverts on the site particularly Google Adsense as it would violate your TOS with paid traffic, use affiliate schemes instead

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Guest Blogger - Tim Nash

Is a reputation management and Search engine Optimisation consultant, when asked if he would consider himself a grey hat, he said ???Off White??�.
When asked does he do these sorts of scams he replied ???I charge over $250 an hour for my consultancy service what do you think??�.

You can find out more about Tim on his site Tim Nash Blog and read more cool posts like this one at the Venture Skills blog.